The Parchments
September 29, 2026 - October 31, 2026
Nel Gallery, Cape Town
The Parchments brings together works that relate to my interest in papermaking and my investigation into the meanings it could generate. The show consists of five large-scale paper pulp collages in which plant material, such as air roots from a Ficus tree or bark fragments from a Eucaluptus tree, have been imbedded.
My artmaking practice is concerned with the interlinking ideas of loss and place. For the last twenty years I have been producing works that deal with the experience of displacement after having lost several homes consecutively in the 1990’s. In recent years her attention has shifted to the losses that are endured in the natural environment due to climate change, focusing on the trees in her immediate ecosystem, the Swartland.
An experience that influenced the iconography of the works in The Parchments was when a severe weather storm in the month of May this year impacted on a tree next to my home. It was during that big storm that the gale force winds took one of the gigantic branches of the monumental tree next to the house where I live. I am saying ‘took’, because the way that the branch fell and the gaping wound that it left in the trunk of the tree were indications that it was pulled out of the trunk rather than just broken off. This may sound like a small thing to many who have been effected in much worse ways by the storm, yet this cavernous hole became a visual reminder to me of the unpredictability of our times.
Many of the paper collages on the show, handmade from recycled paper sourced from discarded study notes, feature visual elements that suggest wounds or wounding, gaping holes with roots protruding, empty spaces with torn edges.
A parchment is the name of a prepared animal skin that revolutionised record keeping and literature in the Middle Ages due to its durability and smooth double-sided writing surface. Through their reference to paper as a writing surface as well as roots and bark as material, the five parchments in this exhibition evoke the purpose and intention of the parchments of the ancient times by recording, in an abstract way, the precarious times that we live in.